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So who made it Create Your Own Infographics week and didn’t tell me? Well, there might not be any reason why they’d think to tell me, but I would still be kind of interested if there WAS some group with the power to decree a Create Your Own Infographics week.

Anyway, a whole bunch of these have cropped up on my radar in the last couple of days.

From the website: “Content is still king. Venngage’s tools make it easy for anyone to create beautiful infographics and data visualizations for their blogs and websites. Watch your audience grow with compelling and beautiful content.”

So I haven’t really played with any of these yet? Looking at the main pages and descriptions – it seems clear that they are looking for a commercial writer/blogger/content producer market, not the educational market. Which doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it’s interesting that that is where the demand is perceived.

I suspect this means that we will soon get reminded of just how difficult it is to make good infographics; it would be nice if a proliferation of DIY infographics would spark a conversation about what makes a good one. Obviously, these conversations are happening, but mostly among those who make them for a living. If everyone starts making them, that conversation would hopefully get broader – like the conversations about what makes a good slidedeck or presentation.

It has been ages since I talked about a new tool/service like this but Shaun came home talking about Storify the other day and it sounded good so I got myself an invite.

Basically, it lets you pull content from the dynamic web, including all of the social social media suspects plus search results, into a timeline-like interface. You add text (or not) and you have a story.

Reading the “one year out” iPad posts that have been popping up, I have been thinking about how I use mine — especially how I use it differently than I expected. One thing I didn’t expect was the extent to which I have used it to replace some of the paper in my life. Not all of it, but some of it. And one of the most interesting pieces of that story, to me, has been the extent to which some of the papers being replaced are the reams and reams of paper worth of article printouts I used to create.

Those printouts were totally outside my workflow in so many ways – but I had to be able to:

Take them places (even my laptop is so much less mobile than a folder of paper and a pen).

Read them (which I could technically do, but not really do on my phone).

Take notes on them (typing doesn’t count for me. I wish it did. But it doesn’t).

There are definitely some glitches – the integration with Flickr wasn’t working at all for me, for example. But it was quick and intuitive and I like the output a lot. I have some more interesting ideas for using it than this one.

I decided before the start of this term, the first term in which I would be teaching a credit class in almost eight years (and I’m teaching 2!) that my Library Skills for English Majors class would collaboratively create an annotated bibliography in Zotero for their main group project.

I want them to develop some facility with Zotero, and this seems like a good way to do this. The ins and outs of working with metadata on Zotero connects back to a lot of the course themes, making even those that are a little abstract seem more concrete. At least I hope so.

I’ve barely explored the Zotero group settings for all that I have been there for a while (and for all that I have group libraries and everything) so I was not at all sure how well it would work or even if it would work for students in this class. I’m still not sure because I’d like them to do a lot of the work in-class, and they don’t have their own computers there. It should be possible for them to sync what they do on library machines to their online libraries, but until we try it, I just won’t know.

So yeah, that’s the reason why I was so happy to find that I’m not the first person to try this -(Profhacker author) Brian Croxall at Clemson did it before and he did it for English and he wrote about it extensively which is so amazingly awesome. I drew heavily from it even when it didn’t directly – it’s amazing how working with someone else’s assignment online is like talking it through, having someone to get you thinking about the stuff you’re forgetting.

Anyway, so the theme they’re building this bibliography around is the scholarly and creative output of their own faculty, This is only a 1-credit class (more on the challenges of doing anything meaningful in a 1 credit class later, I promise) and they don’t have a common research assignment in other classes (or any research assignment, in many cases) so it’s really hard to make it relevant. I am hoping that this focus will add a note of relevance to a kind of abstract skills-for-skills-sake class. I am also fascinated by what our faculty are producing and will enjoy what the students find and choose to add in any event.

via Erin Ellis (facebook) plus then via a bunch of other people — proof that, in the age of social media, an awesome title can boost your impact factor. But the content stands on its own as well – I’ve been thinking a lot about different information seeking style, and how different people gravitate naturally towards different approaches. By Karen Janke and Emily Dill: “New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski

via Cool Tools (blog) Longform to Instapaper. Long Form by itself is pretty cool, it aggregates some of the best long-form (mostly magazine) writing on all kinds of topics. But what makes it really cool is that it integrates seamlessly with Instapaper, meaning that I can find something there, push a button and have it available on my iPad to read offline the next time I am stuck somewhere boring.

via Cliopatria (blog). Obligatory history-related resource — London Lives: 1690-1800. Pulling together documents from 8 archives & 15 datasets, this online archive asks “What was it like to live in the world’s first million person city?”

It became quickly obvious to us that there was no way we could examine the female fashion on Mad Men without looking at ALL the females. Costume Designer Janie Bryant deserves every bit of acclaim and applause that has come her way since she started work on the show. Think of this series of posts as a mini-retrospective. We’ll work our way up to Joan and Betty by looking at each of the other characters first.

Here’s the thing – I love the posts for the big 3 characters – Joan, Betty, and Peggy – but in some ways, I love the posts about the secondary characters more. In the first group, the conversation is very character-driven, what different costuming choices say about different characters, which is fun and interesting. In the second group, though, there’s just as much about what the costumes AND characters say about the time and place in which they’re set – which is right in my analytical sweet spot.

Using social networking visualization tools to visualize the letters that scholars wrote to each other way back in the early days of scholarly communication.

Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.

You can check out their case studies, or do a little bit of playing with their tools.

In the next two days, I’ll be giving a series of talks as part of this workshop in Seattle. Here are the supporting materials for one of them – a short technology demonstration about our Flip video project…

For an example of how we used the Flip video camera we bought — we didn’t use it to demonstrate research processes or to show things in the library. Or, I should say, we did do some of those things but not in the project I am describing.

But we did use the videos in tutorials. Basically, my colleague Hannah and I had to do some work revising a set of tutorials. And as is the case with all tutorials, we had these context-setting pieces that had to go in, pieces where the tutorial explains why the student should take an interest in the process or tool the tutorial will teach them to use. We didn’t want to write up a set of “here’s why you should care” pages to include in the tutorial, but we weren’t sure where to go from there.

And then one of us – I don’t remember who – had the idea to ask our OSU students to talk about research, with the hope that we could then pull out “clips” that would illustrate what it was we were going to talk about.

It turned out to be a fantastic project – so much fun to work on. We worked with our office of Student Leadership and Involvement to identify students who were here in the summer and willing to participate. Then we did a quick 15-30 minute interview with each one. We recorded the whole thing with a Flip camera, and then used iMovie to pull out useful clips. The clips are stored on YouTube, so all of our librarians can use them in tutorials, course pages and elsewhere.

This one is one of my favorites – Emmanuel on how librarians are helpful!